Student Association For International Affairs

Fascism in Ukraine: The West too blind to see it

The West shows strange reactions to what has been happening in Ukraine recently. It appears that the West has a distorted perception of what is happening in the Ukrainian society: numerous violations of human rights, rising fascism – Western critics turn a blind eye on all this.
For example, on May 16, Ukraine banned the St. George’s ribbon, which war veterans and other residents traditionally wear in honour of Victory over Nazi Germany in the Great Patriotic War.
However, a group of Ukrainian MPs dared to set out a protest against the ban. As a result, MP Yuri Bereza, dressed in military camouflage, shouted from the rostrum of the parliament that he would like to «grab a machine gun and shoot those bastards.»
Can anyone imagine anything like that happening in the parliament of any other civilised country? Björn Ditlef Nistad asked this question in his article published on the Steigan Blogger.

If an MP publicly threatened to shoot opposition from a machine gun, would mass media remain silent about it? It would be sensational news, but not in the case of Ukraine. Needless to say that if this happened in the Russian State Duma, the world media would gladly fall into another fit of anti-Russian hysteria.
In another case, the author wrote, security guards of a Ukrainian politician shot a taxi driver in the leg only because he spoke Russian and did not want to say Nazi slogan «Glory to heroes.» Imagine what Western media would write if the story happened in Russia.
Why do Western journalists trumpet a lot about Russian laws on compulsory registration of political organisations funded from abroad, but no one sees Ukrainian laws that criminalise the criticism of Ukrainian fascists from the 1930s and the 1940s – the individuals and groups of people who killed hundreds of thousands of Jews and Poles during WWII?
Apparently, fascism is becoming an integral part of the state ideology of Ukraine. What is happening in this country today – the killings of opposition politicians and journalists, dismissals of policemen for their attempts to protect war veterans from right-wing extremists, calls from the parliament to shoot opposition – can only be referred to as fascism.
However, Western media do not want to inform their readers about it. The author of the above-mentioned article believes that Western media outlets have a biased approach to events in Ukraine.
In Ukraine, representatives of law-enforcement authorities can walk into the parliament and shout something from the rostrum. In any other country, this would be considered an attempt to conduct a military coup. But not in Ukraine. Blocking social networks would be called a sign of a totalitarian state. But not in Ukraine, where the president issued a relevant decree and received only a subtle dose of criticism from Europe.